Word of the Year: Meditation: May You Be ...

Giving Heart. Borderlinks, Tucson, Arizona, September 2019. Artist unknown. Photo credit: Mzuriana.

 

I listened to a podcast on love the other day. The narrator reintroduced me to metta, the Pali word embodying goodwill, friendliness, and loving-kindness toward others in the Buddhist tradition. 

The idea of a metta meditation is to conjure up a person in one's mind and send benevolent intentions to them. There seems to be a similar array of three or four intentions in a metta mantra.

For example, to each of the recipients I mentally picture, I say aloud:

• May you be safe.
• May you be healthy.
• May you be happy. 
• May you be at peace. 

The trick is to include among our list of recipients, not just folks we love, like, or even feel neutral about, but ...also individuals who we resent, fear, or loathe. This last aligns with a common 12-step suggestion: For 30 days, wish for that person to receive all of the good things in life that we would  like to receive for ourselves. Doing so can soften us, again to our benefit, expressing, if you will, the pus that infects our minds and bodies.

Fortunately, there is no goal for us to bring such a person into our literal or figurative embrace. We don't have to be friends with such a person, even if they are a family member. It may not be healthy or safe for us to do so. The metta meditation is a door we can open to free us be safe, healthy, happy, and at peace.

I hold the assumption that if a person is happy and at peace, their actions toward others will be benevolent rather than malicious. That makes it possible for me to wish them safety, health, happiness, and peace.

It's interesting to me that the word metta is from the Pali word referenced above. Pala is the name Aldous Huxley gave to utopian culture in his book, Island. Where the myna birds remind the humans, "here and now, here and now."